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Tag Archives: ads

A lot of indie developers struggle to make sustainable income in the App Store.

Overcast trying ads
Sucks to have another great indie developer implement ads. I totally understand why, I just wish the financial reality of the App Store was different. I’ve always paid for Overcast, the one time unlock at the start and the patronage model in the second year. I’ve tried all the other apps but I always return to Overcast. It just feels the best, it fits how I think about managing my podcasts. Clean and Simple, all the right features and no unnecessary crap cluttering it up. My only minor complaint is the lack of a Mac App. We streaming just doesn’t cut it for me. I often end up listening to podcasts on my phone at my desk, since Messages on the Mac podcasts is really the only thing left only on my phone for my daily needs.

I’ll still pay for premium in hopes that my little contribution can keep one of the best developers in the game!

So I’m hanging out before the game at Scotia Bank Place in Ottawa between their Senators and The St. Louis Blues. I looking around and I barely notice the ring of advertising around every ring of seating and the boards and the ice and and and…. You get the picture, I’m kinda used to it, I think most of us have learned to ignore it, same as the pre and post roll adds online and TV commercials. But for the few times you actually notice the ads what makes them effective?.I noticed this on ad for zip.ca. If your not familier with their service it’s one of the Canadian DVD by mail Netfilx knockoffs. Now I know what Zip.ca is, I’ve blogged a bit about them before, but I’d bet that more then a few people at Scotia Bank Place don’t. How effective does that make this ad. Zip is a pretty generic name, they could do anything, and other then their logo which doesn’t mean anything the ad says nothing about them! Is it good enough to have a great URL that people will maybe remember enough to go home a check it out? I doubt it. Even with a great name I’d just forget the whole thing by the time I get to look it up. Maybe it’s just the my, and a lot of other peoples, ability to completely ignore advertising but I figure they are wasting money!.Do you have an opinion?.

I can’t remember what podcast I was listening to when I made these notes but it gave me a great idea for a way the everyone can make some money from ads. Basically someone has to come up with an ad system that the end user, the person who is being marketed to, give a bit of information and is willing to have some general information collected about and they get a small cut of the ad revenue. I’m not a big fan of ads but if I was making something from it, I wouldn’t mind a banner or small ad in a corner of a site. The end user could maybe even have some options as to which format of ads they see and that would determine different levels of money they could make..So I’m would guess this would work best if it used a browser plug in that tracked everything, cookies I don’t think are reliable enough! So the site would have code to serve the ad, and it could even serve a generic ad for traffic that doesn’t have the plugin. It could easily be implemented on WordPress blogs as a plugin that could either display a widget in the side bar, a banner across the top, what ever the site author, advertiser, ad serving company or users has set up!.To give a bit more credit, does anyone remember that old dial-up ISP that used to offer to pay you to use them? You fired up their dial-up client and it dialed in to them opened a browser window that had a banner across the top and you could surf all you wanted for free and if you spent enough time they’d send you a cheque, typical minimum dollar amounts applied. Either way, I’d probably mess with the system, I doubt I’d serve ad’s on any of my sites but the level of niche targeting and depending on the spits might make something like this very atractive for everyone involved, don’t you?